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Recently, we ran a series of articles on the Quatermass films and we promised coverage of the fourth--and most obscure--Quatermass film. Here it is. This fourth and final outing for the Quatermass character is really nothing but a cobbled-together TV miniseries and it tends to show its age pretty badly with hippies and "relevance," and stuff like that...but it also delivers a pretty strong story with a socko finish. Thus, it's certainly not the worst film that could have been saddled with the responsibility of being...
By J. KNIGHT (Note: With this article, we conclude our series on the four Quatermass films. You may read J. Knight's analysis of The Quatermass Xperiment here, Quatermass II: Enemy From Space here, and Quatermass And The Pit here.) I’m going to confess right up front that I went to college in the late Sixties to early Seventies. I didn’t do enough drugs to wipe out all memory of that turbulent time, so maybe I wasn’t really there, but my college transcript indicates otherwise.
Those years gave us a number of really wonderful movies, from Wild In The Streets (1968), Easy Rider (1969) and Billy Jack (1971), which seemed a lot better at the time than they do today, to Woodstock (1970), Joe (1970) and The Panic In Needle Park (1971) that hold up pretty darned well. They all featured hippies, portraying them, on one end of the spectrum, as beautiful people, God’s children, full of innocence and love, to (on the opposite end) pathetic, drug-addicted losers. By 1978, the era was already drawing to a close. The musical Hair, which debuted on Broadway ten years before, would come to the big screen in 1979, but by then it was practically a nostalgia piece. We were definitely nudging into the post-hippie period when Nigel Kneale’s final Quatermass film, The Quatermass Conclusion, was released, giving us a rather belated tale centering on the planet’s youth and how their phony-baloney spiritualism disguises a terror from space that threatens to annihilate the world’s population.
The misguided young people in The Quatermass Conclusion call themselves "Planet People." I say, "Planet-people, schmanet-people...they’re hippies!" So it is that The Quatermass Conclusion seems oddly out of its decade. How you feel about The Quatermass Conclusion will depend a lot on how you feel about hippie movies from 1970. Originally a four-hour television mini-series, the film version weighs in at a comfortable 105 minutes, which it fills nicely. I didn’t notice any logical gaps that screamed "condensed version" at me, and I honestly have trouble imagining the story taking up twice that much time without serious padding.
The film opens in a world that is almost post- Apocalyptic. The social order has broken down and young people are running "wild in the streets." Everyone’s favorite curmudgeonly scientist, Bernard Quatermass, arrives in London for a television interview and is promptly attacked by youthful thugs. Another scientist, Joe Kapp (Simon MacCorkindale), comes to Quatermass’s rescue with his German Shepherd dog (uncredited). John Mills...oops, make that Sir John Mills…assays the role of Quatermass. Mills has had a long and distinguished career, very often in secondary (or lesser) roles but you’ll see him front-and-center as Father Robinson in 1960’s Swiss Family Robinson.
If we look at Brian Donlevy’s portrayal of Quatermass in the first two films, The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass II: Enemy From Space, we find a rock hard scientist with virtually no human attributes outside an occasional spurt of righteous (or should I say, "self-righteous") anger. In the third film, Quatermass and the Pit, Andrew Keir softened the character. By the time The Quatermass Conclusion rolls around, we have a Quatermass who is positively doughy. For one thing, this elderly Quatermass has given up on science. He’s retired. (I guess the atomic rocket thing never really panned out for him.) He speaks derisively of the current joint American-Russian space project orbiting the Earth, calling it a "wedding of corrupt democracy and monstrous tyranny" and predicts that it will end in disaster. The occasional outburst of irascibility is about the last smidgen we’ll see of the original Quatermass.
In this mad world of the "late 20th century" where a "primal disorder is reasserting itself," Quatermass has only one goal: To locate his missing granddaughter, Hettie (Rebecca Saire). Mills brings plausibility and humanity to the role. He does indeed come across as someone’s grandfather. Unfortunately, we followers of Quatermass have never had any indication of a Mrs. Quatermass, a Quatermass Junior, or any hint that the crusty Professor had any familial ties whatsoever, or any interest in such. To encounter him suddenly in the role of concerned grandfather comes as a bit of a jolt, causing the cynic in me to imagine someone at the studio saying, "Here’s a story about a scientist, so let’s call him "Quatermass" and capitalize on the name." This sort of crass commercialism bothers some people. However, if you can get beyond such niggling concerns, you’ll be rewarded with a pretty darned good story.
The American-Russian space project does indeed end disastrously. Quatermass has barely finished delivering his dire prediction when a monstrous beam from outer space hits the craft and all aboard are killed. Quatermass joins up with Kapp, a radio astronomer, to examine the mystery while searching the countryside for Hettie. Here, the Planet People make their first appearance.
The Planet People are all in their early twenties, and they dress and talk like hippies. Or, more precisely, like a science fiction writer’s version of hippies. They’re converging on a Stonehenge-like stone ring known as Ringstone Round. They wave "magical" balls in the air and chant a nursery rhyme, convinced that they’re bound for another planet. They hate old people and scientists and, especially, old scientists like Quatermass. Quatermass doesn’t think much of the Planet People, either, and neither does Kapp, who considers their belief in mysticism as "violent to human thought." Although Quatermass himself has softened, the humanistic theme survives, linking this film clearly with its predecessors.
They all reach Ringstone Round. Suddenly an enormous energy beam strikes the site and hundreds of Planet People are reduced to dust. The surviving Planet People hail this event as a great success, proclaiming that their fallen comrades have been transported to another planet. Quatermass screams at them, "Another planet, my limey butt! They’re dust, you ignorant twit!" (Okay, that’s not exactly what he says, but that’s the gist of it.) There is one survivor, a young girl about eleven years old, who was blinded by the beam but not struck by it directly. Quatermass wants to get her to the hospital. (In the first Quatermass film, you’ll recall, his impulse upon discovering a wounded astronaut was to take him back to the lab to study like a rat, so you see how far Quatermass has evolved.) The Planet People object and violence ensues. At this point, any notion we may have had that the Planet People were peace-loving strewers of flowers vanishes as the head Planet Person picks up an automatic rifle and gleefully pounds the scientists’ fleeing van with bullets.
More stuff happens, including the little blind girl floating into the air in the hospital and doing something totally unexpected. All around the world, young people are gathering in sacred locations and being blasted by beams from space. Quatermass declares, "The human race is being harvested!" A massive gathering takes place at Wembley Stadium, which I guess is a sacred place to London soccer fans. Quatermass hightails it to Wembley just as a beam hits it. Luckily, he’s stuck in the parking garage at the time and survives. 70,000 young people aren’t so lucky. And the sun turns to vomit.
All right, I’m a little unclear on this last point, even after playing the scene several times to see if the esteemed Professor Bernard Quatermass really did utter the word "vomit." Whatever the rationale, for the rest of the movie the sky is tinged a vomitous yellow, a rather nice touch that visually imparts an atmosphere of doom as mankind approaches the end of days. Quatermass determines through the sheer power of his intellect that the Earth is under attack by an ancient space-faring machine that makes people—young people are especially susceptible—go crazy with rage before sucking up their psychic energy with the beam. He thinks he can stop it by detonating a nuclear bomb just as the beam strikes it, which means cobbling together a transmitter that simulates the sound and smell of thousands of unwashed, pissed off young people.
This task of cobbling falls to the only human beings untouched by the compulsion to self-destruct that has turned all of the young people into raging, lemming- like lunatics: Senior citizens. The over-the-hill gang of scientists leaps into action, foregoing even their afternoon naps and reruns of The Lawrence Welk Show to devote their hours nonstop to this vital undertaking. The bomb is put into place. Kapp’s radio telescope is turned into a giant beam-attractor. The trap is set. A bunch of leftover Planet People converge on the site, one of whom is...Quatermass’s granddaughter!
I won’t say more of the ending except to note that I really liked it. No wimping out in this movie, folks. Nigel Kneale delivers. The Quatermass Conclusion suffers a bit from low- budgetitis, but not too badly. It’s a good story, ably performed, with a satisfying ending. And if it seems a bit dated, well...just wait and see what twenty-five years does to The Day After Tomorrow. (J. Knight maintains a Web site.) Thanks, Jay. It's true--The Quatermass Conclusion does suffer from barely disguised hippie characters and a low budget, but it's a compelling tale and it does, indeed, deliver the groceries at the end. But is it a fit film to end the Quatermass series with? We think not. Yet, we also think of how Tinsletown has recently revived old characters like The Saint and promptly proceeded to ruin them. With that in mind, perhaps this film is the best way to bid a fond farewell to a truly seminal and superior sci-fi/horror series. Article copyright © J. Knight |
